Technology

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Fridays, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories. In today’s episode, the crew starts the show with Tesla’s quarterly earnings, which leads to a discussion of the state of electric cars in America — what models are actually available, the move from green to blue branding, and if Tesla has figured out the Cybertruck’s windshield wipers yet. Later in the show, Alex explains why Netflix is “banging the TV murder drum” and what its next move may be in a big field of competitors. Is killing ...

Bookmarking apps are a lost art. They were once a hot industry, where Delicious and Diigo and Wink and Furl (these are all real names, I swear!) competed to be the home for all your URLs. But those went out of style right around the time James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” dropped off the radio charts, and the whole idea of “bookmarks” never really came back in style. You have browser bookmarks; what else do you need? Here’s why you should be using a bookmarking app: because it’s the storage unit the internet needs. Seriously, think of it like you rented one of those self-storage squares, and now you have a place for all of the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Instead of emailing yourself links or keeping 100 tabs open just in case, every time you come across a URL you might need, fire i...

The Google search engine will be banned in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, currently under Russian occupation, as reported by The Guardian. Denis Pushilin, leader of the Russia-backed separatist state Donetsk People’s Republic, posted a message on Telegram accusing Google of “promot[ing] terrorism and violence against all Russians, and especially the population of Donbas,” according to The Guardian. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine this spring, a number of social media platforms have been banned in Russia and in the occupied regions. In March, a Russian ban on Facebook and Instagram was upheld, accusing the platforms of engaging in “extremist activities” for policies that allow for users in some countries to share content that normally woul...

Whether you’re trying to make the most of your summer or planning ahead for the fall semester, our deals team is always busy chasing down deals. And if you’re a college-bound student looking for a powerful machine for content creation, Apple’s latest MacBook Pro likely fits the bill (if you can afford it). Thankfully, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is currently on sale at Best Buy and B&H Photo with an eight-core M1 Pro CPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $1,749 ($250 off), matching the lowest price we’ve seen for Apple’s premium laptop. In addition to providing some of the best performance and battery life we’ve seen in an Apple laptop, the 14-inch MacBook Pro offers extensive connectivity options, allowing you to use microSD cards or an external monitor without having to rely on a se...

AMD looks to be on the cusp of releasing a competitor to RTX Voice, a feature for Nvidia graphics cards that cancels out background noise when you’re on a call or otherwise using your mic. That’s according to a trailer that AMD posted to its YouTube channel (apparently in error), Tom’s Hardware reports. Thankfully, a copy of the trailer was downloaded before it was deleted by Reddit user u/zenobian and uploaded to the AMD subreddit. The leaked trailer suggests that AMD’s Noise Suppression feature will work very similarly to Nvidia’s RTX Voice (which has subsequently been rolled into Nvidia’s Broadcast app). It uses “a real-time deep learning algorithm” to offer “two-way noise-reduction” that filters background noise out of both outgoing and incoming microphone audio, and is apparently buil...

One of the magical things about near-field communication technology (NFC) is that tags don’t need a battery to communicate — you’ll never need to buy a new coin cell for your employee badge, because the badge scanner wirelessly beams enough power to the badge to verify it’s legit. Now, chipmaker Infineon wants to make the same thing happen with smart locks — ones that can be entirely powered by your phone. You can already buy fancy door locks in Europe and basic padlocks in China that do the trick, with Finland’s iLOQ claiming to have been the first to do it back in 2016. But today, Infineon is selling a new chip and offering full detailed instructions (PDF) to anyone who wants in on the idea. It’s called the NAC1080, and it’s designed to be a single chip that does practically the whole th...

With a months-long recess on the horizon, House progressives are urging Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to act fast on two competition bills that would better equip antitrust enforcers to take on major tech firms. In a letter sent to Schumer on Friday, more than a dozen Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders urged the Senate majority leader to schedule a vote on two bills in the coming weeks. “It is time for Congress to vote on this legislation,” the lawmakers wrote. “These bills are ready for a vote and we urge you to schedule the vote on them in the next few weeks.” The bills – the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) and Open Markets Act –were introduced on the heels of a 16-month long congressional investigation into possible anticompetitive behavior by Amazon, Apple...

Lyft launched its rental car service in December 2019, more than a year after Uber shut down a similar program that provided rental cars and access to bike rides and public transportation. Lyft Rentals stood out for its low starting rate of $35 a day and lack of mileage limit that also allowed renters as young as 22 years old. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports Lyft has decided to call it quits, and the company confirmed to The Verge that it laid off about 60 employees in the rental car service as well as a smaller number of people in operations. In an emailed statement, the company told The Verge it discontinued the business to instead focus on partnerships with rental car companies Sixt and Hertz. “This decision will ensure we continue to have national coverage and offer riders a more ...

Snap knows it can do better. The company reported earnings results for the second quarter of 2022 this afternoon, and the numbers show a company that’s continuing to grow its users and revenue — but at a much slower rate than it used to. “Our financial results for Q2 do not reflect the scale of our ambition,” the company wrote in a note to investors. “We are not satisfied with the results we are delivering.” The message was part of a rallying cry to investors that essentially says hang tight, we’re working on it. To turn things around, Snap is promising to “recalibrate” its hiring, goals, and investments. And, in a splashier move, the company said it had signed Snap co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, the company’s CEO and CTO, to stick around for another four years, through the end...